Global Energy Company: Disaster Recovery

A global energy company was experiencing difficulties with the high costs involved in operating its applications mainframe for finance, and it wanted to create a disaster recovery capability. Accenture defined the solution blueprint for the migration to a new Windows environment with disaster recovery capability and led the entire effort, specifically managing the entire Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) of the project, including solution design, technology architecture, migration, testing, deployment and post go-live support. As a result of Accenture’s work on the project, the company has lowered its total cost of ownership (TCO) for its application and has back up recovery for its data applications in the case of a disaster or breakdown, which is critical for litigation risks.

Business Challenge

The company was looking for a partner for a major mainframe decommissioning project for disaster recovery. It turned to Accenture for help as a preferred provider of services. Also, Accenture had a partnership with Microfocus and a Certified Microfocus Migration Factory in Manila, Philippines, as well as past experience in mainframe migrations.

How We Helped

Working together, the company and Accenture defined the solution blueprint, interfaced with various client teams and vendors to put together a detailed work plan and led the entire effort.

Additionally, Accenture:

Managed the entire systems development life cycle of the project, including solution design, technology architecture, migration, testing, deployment and post go-live support.

Assumed the role of coordinator to manage related client areas within business, infrastructure and enterprise support.

High Performance Delivered

Accenture’s work on the project helped the company gain access to its finance applications and approximately 100 terabytes of data, even in the event of a disaster or a breakdown. This would allow the company to generate reports and data for litigation in a shorter time, making it easier for the support team to retrieve this data.

Possessing a disaster recovery capability as well as the online availability and backup of the 100 terabytes of financial data was critical for the company’s legal team in the event of disputes and litigation.

Additionally, the company now has:

Documentation to test and validate any cases to its application mainframe thoroughly.

A source code management system and a development/test environment and formal code promotion process, which shows what is being used on the mainframe and helps the application support team develop and test changes before promoting them to production.